Servers--Beyond the Bitmap

The challenge within publishing is how to maximize the usage of existing network and server resources, yet maintain a viable workflow. How do you keep up with the increasing number and volume of files? New technologies are compressing, scaling and reinventing ways to manipulate digital content—signaling the dawn of resolution-independent digital prepress and more effective images.

BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO

Future serving. The conversion from an environment where photographic images are described as pixels to a more purely mathematical representation of images will result in fundamental changes in serving processes.

Dennis Aubrey, president at Burbank, CA-based Altamira Group, is intimately familiar with this reality. Altamira Group is a privately held corporation that develops and markets digital imaging solutions. Its mission: Solve fundamental problems facing the digital imaging community and provide solutions that create opportunities for their clients and partners to compete on higher levels.

For Aubrey, this means marketing solutions such as Genuine Fractals, which transforms photographic images into resolution-independent assets by eliminating the relationship between pixels and resolution.

Images are optimized in Adobe Photoshop as usual, establishing how the final image will appear. Any image refinements created in Photoshop are locked in, and the image is encoded using Genuine Fractals proprietary mathematical algorithms.

The end result: The pixels of the final image are replaced with a new structure that stores the entire image, without any pixels. Altamira Group's flagship products, Genuine Fractals PrintPro and PagePro XT, bring resolution-independent imaging to prepress, graphics and printing professionals.

Aubrey explains the creative madness behind this method—and the benefits it has on server performance.

"Currently, we are in the world of file servers. In dealing with raster assets, a server now functions as a device that stores and serves pixel versions of these assets on-demand for use in different parts of the workflow," Aubrey states.